Leibniz tried to justify God's ways to men even more directly than Milton, and in a purely intellectual respect he was distinctly more successful than his poetic rival. In the seventeenth-century historical and ideological context, the main problems which a conciliatory and synthetic thinker like Leibniz faced were those prompted by the rise of modern science and especially by its leading idea that the universe is governed by strictly universal, mathematically expressible natural laws. How can such an idea be reconciled with the presence of freedom and contingency in the world? And how can the reality of exceptionless natural laws be reconciled with the accepted tenet that the world was created freely by an epistemologically and morally perfect deity? Moreover, Leibniz faced also the perennial problem of theodicy, of reconciling God's goodness, omniscience and omnipotence with the blatant imperfections of the world.